


The Fall of the United States of America

by peetymellark



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-10
Updated: 2014-09-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 20:11:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2283018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peetymellark/pseuds/peetymellark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wrote this for an English class last year and have decided to post it. This is my idea of how the United States of America fell and became the terror that is Suzanne Collins' Panem. This does contain random references to my University, sorry if they do not make sense to you!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fall of the United States of America

I was 20 years old when the United States of America collapsed. It seemed like an ordinary September afternoon. I had just begun my junior year at the University of Georgia. Sure, we had all heard about the government shutting down (again) and about the debt passing the ceiling that had been put in place. However, our country surely would stumble through like it normally did right? After all, this was not the first time we had been in this position, and we had allies to help us through our toughest moments. Nothing too bad would come of all this.

How very wrong we all were. The population on campus was already severely depleted, only those of us living in Georgia were still able to attend my University. The cost of keeping up our flights, even across the nation, was simply too high for us to maintain. The country had never come out of our previous recession, instead falling into a more severe depression than that of the 1930's. Our dear President, Clark Feltman, reassured our nation that everything was fine. We were fine, our currency was fine, our country would be fine. How stupid we were to put faith in a politician. He rejected help from our foreign allies, saying he would take no more handouts, would not increase our debts to them anymore. Some people praised him for this. My father called it selfish pride. "He's going to run this country into the ground,all because he can't handle the fact that he can do nothing on his own," my father said when he heard the news. How very right he was.

On that day in September, the day everything ended, I was not considering where I would get my next meal, how my family would survive, or even how much longer I could stay in school. No, my thoughts were on the football game at the end of the week. It was to be the first home game of the season and I could not wait to get into Sanford Stadium and cheer on my Dawgs. However, halfway through the week, Wednesday September 9th, my whole world collapsed. Or rather, my country did. It came on the television in my apartment, the United States, now completely isolated from every other country, had collapsed. We had no money left, we could not borrow anything else. We were finished.

I immediately was brought home, there was no college left to go to. Violence abounded as people fought tooth and nail just to bring home a loaf of bread. Instead of cooperating, we all turned on each other, suspicious of other's motives. With no government in those first six months, people were free to act as they chose, and they chose to fight, to kill, to do whatever it took to survive. I could not believe the state of my beloved homeland, how easily people fell into these new roles. I asked once, of a boy I had grown up with how he bore the weight of all the violent acts he had committed. It was with haunted eyes that he told me that he would do anything if it meant keeping his family safe and well fed. However, it was becoming harder to see that anyone could be safe. We could not leave our states, or districts as they had begun to call them. We were trapped in the violence of our every day lives, and our Capitol was doing nothing. Nothing at all, but sit around and try to "find a solution".

Well, that was just fine and dandy for them. What did they care that people were dying in the streets? They had to get their JOBS back. They needed a way to start making their money again. However, when the worst storms in history began to rock our country, they saw the frail hope of getting back to the way we were slip through their fingers. Because, how could we go back when California and Florida had finally succumbed to the oceans that had been eating away at their shores? When the deserts of the West became so hot and had so much radiation that they were uninhabitable? We were being pushed closer together in location, but in spirit our country had never been more divided.

Then came the unexpected, terrifying return of government. We had been living in near anarchy for five years. Sometimes we would have small bursts of action from Washington DC, but no one took them seriously anymore. However, when a new Capitol rose from the ashes in the Rocky Mountains, we were unable to ignore them. Mostly because they threatened to kill us if we tried anything. This new government had gathered all our nuclear weapons and they had them pointed not at enemies, but at their own people. If we did not cooperate, you could prepare for a swift demise for your district. That is how Districts 14-28 were destroyed. Only 13 of our previous great states remained. The others had been claimed by natural disasters or by the country north of us.

Another thing that became in abundantly clear, all of our country's riches had not been lost. There was still abundant food, money, technology, everything. But it had been horded by our new Capitol. In order to safeguard these things, they took them from the people, stole them in the night and then used them for their own gain. We had nothing in the Districts but in the Capitol, they had everything. As if this weren't enough, the new government began to send in the new police forces to the Districts. These men and women were supposedly meant to keep the peace in the all too violent Districts. However, they mainly just beat us down, made us hope for nothing, punished for crimes we did not even know were illegal. To rebel was pointless, we had seen what happened to our other Districts when they tried to stand up for democracy.

So we learned to live with it, performing menial tasks, being punished now simply because it seemed the police force liked to punish us. We were trapped in a tyrannical government with no escape route. In the beginning, we had hoped that maybe some foreign power would be able to come in and save us. However, no such help came, whether it was even offered or not, I will never know. It took years, but we eventually got used to our new roles as slaves to the Capitol. We still had little things, like being able to love whoever you wanted to, that made life feel like it was worth it sometimes. But even that had a bitter edge to those of us who had grown up in the United States. We were poor, unbelievably so. We couldn't afford pretty dresses and big parties to get married with. But our children would not remember those times. Perhaps they could find some joy in this new world, perhaps the Capitol would one day loosen its grip on the Districts, become a normal government. It's the best we can hope for, and it is this hope for the future that keeps us going. The Capitol tried to drown it out, but they could not do so with their fear tactics. After all, hope is the only thing that is stronger than fear.

*Some ideas were taken from Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print.


End file.
